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There are many jira alternatives out there, from what I can tell. Why are they not disrupted already, if it’s such a low hanging fruit? (Honest question - I don

There are many jira alternatives out there, from what I can tell. Why are they not disrupted already, if it’s such a low hanging fruit? (Honest question - I don’t have any personal preference)

cogman10 5y ago
Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement. You can't easily dump Jira if you are using Jira, confluence, bitbucket, and whatever their CI/CD product is called (bamboo?)
- nerdponx 5y ago
  How many PMs actually use those features? In my organization, for example, I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    There's a ton of things you can do in Jira, and different organizations use different things. It's like excel or word, in that sense.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    > How many PMs actually use those features? It isn't the set of features that makes them sticky. It is the 10% of features the lead PM can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the team PM's can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the developers can't live without, and the roll-up report features the leadership team can't live without... There has been some research into this phenomena [1]. I'm not aware of a handy term for the phenomena, would surely appreciate someone pointing me to it, and the industry recognizing it and building for it, though. Internally in my head I call it "multiplexing feature sets". Though I never say that aloud and just give the long-winded explanation if I have to bring it up in meetings. > ...I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia. In large-organization dynamics, never underestimate the familiarity and inertia factors. I regularly see vendors screw this up so badly. Account management teams of even large organization vendors (so they should be taking action upon this, but apparently are not) regularly have no clue what kind of massive red flag it takes to push their decade(s)-entrenched product from "man we wish this could be better" to "you really need to fix this, or we need to start looking elsewhere". How do you tell when a customer is just kvetching and presenting empty threats, or is laying it on the line to you? Easy: the customer is happy to share with you specific details of how the product shortcomings/defects are impacting line of business processes and the business impact (ask for this under the cover of learning what the critical business impact is so your support teams can devise the most appropriate tactical technical solution for immediate partial/total relief), and is eager for live working sessions with the customer's engineers. And understand this: rarely will a customer reveal they have switched away until it is practically finished. They want to maintain what little interim support quality they have left, until they can step off. If your account management practices engage "all hands on deck" priority support when you get wind of a competitor in the wheelhouse, then you've lost before you even started. That's why the reveal is always a shock to vendors, and always a done deal when it is shared. The time to understand that your product and product support consumption experience for a particular set of customer needs is horribly broken is when you notice a customer requesting product support leadership engagement more than 2-3 times in a year. If you aren't tracking those engagement touch points, then I guarantee you are losing license sales. They just don't show up in the sales metrics. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705817302709 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187770581...
    - sufyanadam 5y ago
      What are these features that PMs can't live without, that they don't get with an alternative such as, say, Pivotal Tracker?
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    I think that the larger and more dystopian organisations cannot do better than Jira to fulfill their needs.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Github covers the latter two. It's easier to switch than ever.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    > Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Even taking the following into account? >> Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Well if your organisation wants crappy project management tools and processes then there's nothing to be done. But there are plenty of alternatives out there for those who seek them.
      - rtpg 5y ago
        It is actually possible to want bespoke tools to do certain things. And honestly? Confluence is slow, but at least it has all the features I could want and it works. People are like”use the shiny thing” forgetting the existing thing has, you know, stuff I actually use.
      - Cederfjard 5y ago
        Thanks, I got you. But you didn’t really address the point of the person you responded to, then, which was that part of why this space hasn’t been disrupted to a larger degree is that Atlassian products are entrenched in many companies, and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might).
        gurkendoktor 5y ago
        > ... and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might). As much as I love to hate Atlassian, I feel like complaining about Atlassian is like techies complaining about management in general. Every single anecdote is both terrible and true, but it's not quite as easy as it seems to do it better.
- pidminusone 5y ago
  GitLab has wikis, CI/CD and sprint / issue / project management features. We use it at $DAY_JOB and while not perfect it's a pretty great offering.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Not just product managers. All kinds of enterprise processes decompose nicely into tickets. Arbitrary workflows, transitions, validations, custom fields, filters, and reports make it one of the most successful “no code” tools behind Excel, and then the REST API is comprehensive and well documented. At my company JIRA bots are compelling and cheap alternatives to new web UIs for internal tooling needs, surprisingly often.
phreack 5y ago
I wish I knew the answer as well. I believe many managers trained in the art of building software without knowing how to build software are too married to doing processes in a very specific way that's very tightly coupled to Jira, and feel safe and at home with the added complexity it provides, so they vouch for it. But that's just a theory from personal experience.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Jira is as complex as you make it and you can't solve people issues with technology. So another solution won't solve your manager problem. That said, the UI is an abomination that will one day summon the elder gods to reap us all.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    Yeah, I've never seen the Jira code, but I've dealt with the API. It is VERY clear the software is a chaotic mess based on the API.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    I mean, if the problem you have is that Jira lets you set up overly complex workflows, then a more limited solution that forces a simpler way of working could have a positive effect? I do agree that you don’t HAVE to make things more complicated than necessary in Jira, but obviously some do that anyway.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      If the manager wants a complex workflow then they will make one outside the project management software if needed. Except now you'll need to manually track everything as a developer.
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    Taking away configuration options from most Jira project managers I’ve come across would be a very helpful first step.
marcinzm 5y ago
Because Jira is flexible and has the needed features and integrates with most things you care about. To the point where everyone in the org can tolerate it. Alternatives tend to focus on one group of users and the rest HATE the product. I've tried a lot of these products and in the end come back to Jira because it works better on average for everyone.
- Bahamut 5y ago
  This comment nails it - anyone who has had to investigate other offerings that satisfy the needs of project management, design, and engineering will quickly find that all the other options out there are total garbage in comparison to Jira, which is why Jira remains at the top of the totem pole for what it does. As an engineer & former manager, there are definitely things I didn't like about Jira like slowness, but everything else I investigated/used were worse in multiple significant ways.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    My current company tried Monday. The engineers begged for Jira after that.
    - cmorgan31 5y ago
      There's a worse world - one where you have on prem Jira, Monday, Paper, O365, Confluence, Github, and internal api documentation all out of alignment with the other. I'm begging to just end my misery.
  - matwood 5y ago
    The other thing about jira is it’s configurability. I look for replacements every so often and all will require us to change our process. We have adapted jira to our exact process like I’m sure many teams have.
nickspicer1993 5y ago
I think it already has been disrupted but no company is going to switch task management software without a really good reason. But I can't imagine and fresh companies are choosing Jira over Clubhouse, Asana, Trello or what I hope to be my company at some point! https://tahsk.com https://tahsk.com
- edoceo 5y ago
  My new companies aren't. Gitlab is the new hotness
  - nickspicer1993 5y ago
    Yeah I've heard a lot of people using Gitlab as you don't need to mess around with any integration and it's all in one place which is really nice. I find actually managing the issues super lacking and frustrating personally though.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
  fwiw Trello is owned by Atlassian.
manigandham 5y ago
This is the primary failing of many tech people/companies. You can't compete by just building a "better" technical product. Everything from sales to support to customizations and integrations matter to companies, especially as they grow and develop their own teams and management structures which require the software mold into their workflows. Whether the management processes are the best is a different conversation, but being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful. It's the same reason why Salesforce has dominated CRMs even with so many "modern" alternatives around.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful It’s incidentally also exactly why they’re often horrid to work with.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
There aren’t that many if your requirements include on-prem and being flexible enough to not be only for software development using agile.
mumblemumble 5y ago
The thing about products that occupy the kind of niche that Jira does is, the people using the product are not the people making the purchasing decision. They rarely even talk to each other. If you come to a venue like Hacker News, you'll mostly be getting opinions of the people who actually use the product. These opinions do not reflect the interests and priorities of the people who decide which product to buy.
chousuke 5y ago
The thing about Jira is that it provides much more than just tickets. It's really not even bad at what it does as far as user workflows go, it's just really easy to misconfigure due to lackluster administrative tooling. I work with a Jira instance that has something like 20 years of history and over half a million tickets. Migrating just the tickets and their comments might be possible, but migrating all the other metadata and every service and automation we've integrated into the workflows (some of which we depend on to be able to work at all) would take months of work if a suitable alternative even exists in the first place. If it were just tickets and some CI integrations, migrating away from Jira would be trivial, but that's not where all the value is.
brundolf 5y ago
I used Clubhouse at a past job and it was great. I can understand why companies may not be able to move off of Jira, but I can't understand why one would start using it in today's world.

There are many jira alternatives out there, from what I can tell. Why are they not disrupted already, if it’s such a low hanging fruit? (Honest question - I don’t have any personal preference)

cogman10 5y ago

Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement. You can't easily dump Jira if you are using Jira, confluence, bitbucket, and whatever their CI/CD product is called (bamboo?)

nerdponx 5y ago
How many PMs actually use those features? In my organization, for example, I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia.
- riffraff 5y ago
  There's a ton of things you can do in Jira, and different organizations use different things. It's like excel or word, in that sense.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > How many PMs actually use those features? It isn't the set of features that makes them sticky. It is the 10% of features the lead PM can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the team PM's can't live without, and the slightly-overlapping-but-different 10% of features the developers can't live without, and the roll-up report features the leadership team can't live without... There has been some research into this phenomena [1]. I'm not aware of a handy term for the phenomena, would surely appreciate someone pointing me to it, and the industry recognizing it and building for it, though. Internally in my head I call it "multiplexing feature sets". Though I never say that aloud and just give the long-winded explanation if I have to bring it up in meetings. > ...I don't see any reason why we should prefer Atlassian over Taiga, other than familiarity and inertia. In large-organization dynamics, never underestimate the familiarity and inertia factors. I regularly see vendors screw this up so badly. Account management teams of even large organization vendors (so they should be taking action upon this, but apparently are not) regularly have no clue what kind of massive red flag it takes to push their decade(s)-entrenched product from "man we wish this could be better" to "you really need to fix this, or we need to start looking elsewhere". How do you tell when a customer is just kvetching and presenting empty threats, or is laying it on the line to you? Easy: the customer is happy to share with you specific details of how the product shortcomings/defects are impacting line of business processes and the business impact (ask for this under the cover of learning what the critical business impact is so your support teams can devise the most appropriate tactical technical solution for immediate partial/total relief), and is eager for live working sessions with the customer's engineers. And understand this: rarely will a customer reveal they have switched away until it is practically finished. They want to maintain what little interim support quality they have left, until they can step off. If your account management practices engage "all hands on deck" priority support when you get wind of a competitor in the wheelhouse, then you've lost before you even started. That's why the reveal is always a shock to vendors, and always a done deal when it is shared. The time to understand that your product and product support consumption experience for a particular set of customer needs is horribly broken is when you notice a customer requesting product support leadership engagement more than 2-3 times in a year. If you aren't tracking those engagement touch points, then I guarantee you are losing license sales. They just don't show up in the sales metrics. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705817302709 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187770581...
  - sufyanadam 5y ago
    What are these features that PMs can't live without, that they don't get with an alternative such as, say, Pivotal Tracker?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I think that the larger and more dystopian organisations cannot do better than Jira to fulfill their needs.
nicoburns 5y ago
Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Github covers the latter two. It's easier to switch than ever.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  > Clubhouse (soon to be renamed Shortcut) covers the first two. Even taking the following into account? >> Atlassian products are vast, integrated, and support all the crazy draconian processes that every insane project manager wants to implement.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Well if your organisation wants crappy project management tools and processes then there's nothing to be done. But there are plenty of alternatives out there for those who seek them.
    - rtpg 5y ago
      It is actually possible to want bespoke tools to do certain things. And honestly? Confluence is slow, but at least it has all the features I could want and it works. People are like”use the shiny thing” forgetting the existing thing has, you know, stuff I actually use.
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      Thanks, I got you. But you didn’t really address the point of the person you responded to, then, which was that part of why this space hasn’t been disrupted to a larger degree is that Atlassian products are entrenched in many companies, and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might).
      - gurkendoktor 5y ago
        > ... and that a lot of people do want that complexity (disagree with that as you or I might). As much as I love to hate Atlassian, I feel like complaining about Atlassian is like techies complaining about management in general. Every single anecdote is both terrible and true, but it's not quite as easy as it seems to do it better.
pidminusone 5y ago
GitLab has wikis, CI/CD and sprint / issue / project management features. We use it at $DAY_JOB and while not perfect it's a pretty great offering.
closeparen 5y ago
Not just product managers. All kinds of enterprise processes decompose nicely into tickets. Arbitrary workflows, transitions, validations, custom fields, filters, and reports make it one of the most successful “no code” tools behind Excel, and then the REST API is comprehensive and well documented. At my company JIRA bots are compelling and cheap alternatives to new web UIs for internal tooling needs, surprisingly often.

phreack 5y ago

I wish I knew the answer as well. I believe many managers trained in the art of building software without knowing how to build software are too married to doing processes in a very specific way that's very tightly coupled to Jira, and feel safe and at home with the added complexity it provides, so they vouch for it. But that's just a theory from personal experience.

marcinzm 5y ago
Jira is as complex as you make it and you can't solve people issues with technology. So another solution won't solve your manager problem. That said, the UI is an abomination that will one day summon the elder gods to reap us all.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Yeah, I've never seen the Jira code, but I've dealt with the API. It is VERY clear the software is a chaotic mess based on the API.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  I mean, if the problem you have is that Jira lets you set up overly complex workflows, then a more limited solution that forces a simpler way of working could have a positive effect? I do agree that you don’t HAVE to make things more complicated than necessary in Jira, but obviously some do that anyway.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    If the manager wants a complex workflow then they will make one outside the project management software if needed. Except now you'll need to manually track everything as a developer.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Taking away configuration options from most Jira project managers I’ve come across would be a very helpful first step.

marcinzm 5y ago

Because Jira is flexible and has the needed features and integrates with most things you care about. To the point where everyone in the org can tolerate it. Alternatives tend to focus on one group of users and the rest HATE the product. I've tried a lot of these products and in the end come back to Jira because it works better on average for everyone.

Bahamut 5y ago
This comment nails it - anyone who has had to investigate other offerings that satisfy the needs of project management, design, and engineering will quickly find that all the other options out there are total garbage in comparison to Jira, which is why Jira remains at the top of the totem pole for what it does. As an engineer & former manager, there are definitely things I didn't like about Jira like slowness, but everything else I investigated/used were worse in multiple significant ways.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  My current company tried Monday. The engineers begged for Jira after that.
  - cmorgan31 5y ago
    There's a worse world - one where you have on prem Jira, Monday, Paper, O365, Confluence, Github, and internal api documentation all out of alignment with the other. I'm begging to just end my misery.
- matwood 5y ago
  The other thing about jira is it’s configurability. I look for replacements every so often and all will require us to change our process. We have adapted jira to our exact process like I’m sure many teams have.

nickspicer1993 5y ago

I think it already has been disrupted but no company is going to switch task management software without a really good reason. But I can't imagine and fresh companies are choosing Jira over Clubhouse, Asana, Trello or what I hope to be my company at some point! https://tahsk.com https://tahsk.com

edoceo 5y ago
My new companies aren't. Gitlab is the new hotness
- nickspicer1993 5y ago
  Yeah I've heard a lot of people using Gitlab as you don't need to mess around with any integration and it's all in one place which is really nice. I find actually managing the issues super lacking and frustrating personally though.
thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
fwiw Trello is owned by Atlassian.

manigandham 5y ago

This is the primary failing of many tech people/companies. You can't compete by just building a "better" technical product. Everything from sales to support to customizations and integrations matter to companies, especially as they grow and develop their own teams and management structures which require the software mold into their workflows. Whether the management processes are the best is a different conversation, but being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful. It's the same reason why Salesforce has dominated CRMs even with so many "modern" alternatives around.

Aeolun 5y ago
> being able to support any scenario is why Jira and Confluence are so successful It’s incidentally also exactly why they’re often horrid to work with.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

There aren’t that many if your requirements include on-prem and being flexible enough to not be only for software development using agile.

mumblemumble 5y ago

The thing about products that occupy the kind of niche that Jira does is, the people using the product are not the people making the purchasing decision. They rarely even talk to each other. If you come to a venue like Hacker News, you'll mostly be getting opinions of the people who actually use the product. These opinions do not reflect the interests and priorities of the people who decide which product to buy.

chousuke 5y ago

The thing about Jira is that it provides much more than just tickets. It's really not even bad at what it does as far as user workflows go, it's just really easy to misconfigure due to lackluster administrative tooling. I work with a Jira instance that has something like 20 years of history and over half a million tickets. Migrating just the tickets and their comments might be possible, but migrating all the other metadata and every service and automation we've integrated into the workflows (some of which we depend on to be able to work at all) would take months of work if a suitable alternative even exists in the first place. If it were just tickets and some CI integrations, migrating away from Jira would be trivial, but that's not where all the value is.

brundolf 5y ago

I used Clubhouse at a past job and it was great. I can understand why companies may not be able to move off of Jira, but I can't understand why one would start using it in today's world.